anthropology]
AMERICA
375
reference to natural features. No standards of weighing paid to furniture. In the smoke-infested wigwam and hut or measuring were known, but the parts of the body the ground was the best place for sitting or sleeping. The were the units, and money consisted in rare and durable communal houses of the Pacific coast had bunks. The vegetable and animal substances, which scarcely reached the hammock was universal in the Tropics, and chairs of wood dignity of a mechanism of exchange. If the interpretation or stone. Eating was from the pot, with the hand or of the Maya calculiform glyphs be trustworthy, these people spoon. Tables, knives, forks, and other prandial apparatus had carried their numeral system into the hundreds of were as lacking as they were in the palaces of kings a few thousands, and devised symbols for recording such high centuries before. Stone-working was universal in America. The tribes numbers. The Americans were, in most places, flesh-eaters. The quarried by means of crowbars and picks of wood and air, the waters, and the land were their base of supplies, bone. They split the silicious rocks with stonem and cannibalism, it is admitted, was widespread. stone hammers, and then chipped them into working. Food. ^ Witll this animal diet everywhere, vegetable shape with bone tools. Soap-stone for pottery . substances were mixed, even in the boreal regions. Where was partly cut into the desired shape in the native ledge, the temperature allowed vegetable diet increased, and fruits, broken or prised loose, and afterwards scraped into form. seeds, and roots were laid under tribute. Storage was Paint was excavated with the ubiquitous digging-stick, and common, and also the drying of ripened fruits. The most rubbed fine on stones with water or grease. For polished favoured areas were those where corn and other plants stonework the material was pecked by blows, ground with could be artificially produced, and there barbaric cultures other stones, and smoothed with fine material. Sawing were elaborated. This farming was of the rudest kind. was done by means of sand or with a thin piece of harder Plots of ground were burned over, trees were girdled, and stuff. Boring was effected with the sand-drill; the hardest seeds were planted by means of sharpened sticks. The rocks may have been pierced with specially hard sand. first year the crop would be free from weeds, the second At any rate stones were sawed, shaped, polished, carved, year - only those grew whose seeds were wafted or carried and perforated, not only by the Mexicans, but among by birds, the third year the crop required hoeing, which other tribes. For building purposes stones were got out, was done with sticks, and then the space was abandoned dressed, carved, and sculptured with stone hammers and for new ground. Irrigation and terrace culture were chisels made of hard and tenacious rock. Stonecutters practised at several points on the Pacific slope from Arizona tools of metal are not known to have existed, and they to Peru. The steps along which plant and animal domes- were not needed. Their quarrying and stone working was tication passed upwards in artificiality are graphically illus- most wasteful. Those localities where chipping was done reveal hundreds of tons of splinters and failures, and these trated in the aboriginal food quest. Except in the boreal areas the breech-clout was nearly are often counted as ruder implements of an earlier time. universal with men, and the cincture or short petticoat The dressed stones for great buildings were pecked out of with women. Even in Mexican and Mayan the ledges, and broken off with levers in pieces much too Clothing sculptures the gods are arrayed in gorgeous large for their needs. and adorn- preecivciouts. The foot-gear in the tropics was Metals were treated as malleable stones by the American the sandal, and passing northward the moccasin, aborigines. No evidence of smelting ores with fluxes is becoming the long boot in the Arctic. Trousers and the offered, but casting from metal melted in open MetaIlurgym blouse were known only among the Eskimo, and it is fires is assumed. Gold, silver, copper, pure or difficult to say how much these have been modified by mixed with tin or silver, are to be found here and there m contact. Leggings and skin robes took their place south- both continents, and nuggets were objects of worship. ward, giving way at last to the nude. Head coverings Tools and appliances for working metals were of the rudest also were gradually tabooed south of the 49th parallel. kind, and if moulds for casting were employed these were Tattooing and painting the body were well-nigh universal. broken up; at least no museum contains samples of them, Labrets were worn by Eskimo, Tlinkit, Nahuatlas, and and the processes are not described. In the Arctic and tribes on the Brazilian coast. For ceremonial purposes Pacific coast provinces, about Lake Superior, in Virginia all American tribes were expert in masquerade and dramatic and North Carolina, as well as in ruder parts of Mexico apparel. A study of these in the historic tribes makes and South America, metals were cold-hammered into plates, weapons, rods, and wire, ground and polished, plain the motives in gorgeous Mexican sculptures. The tribal system of family organization, universal in fashioned into carved blocks of hard, tenacious stone by America, dominated the dwelling. The Eskimo under- pressure or blow, overlaid, cold-welded, and plated. Soldering, brazing, and the blowpipe in the Cordilleran houses of sod and snow, wigwams, the Dfine and Habitation, ground bunc}i the provinces are suspected, but the evidence of their existence of bark or skin Pawnee earth lodge, the Iroquois long house, the Tlinkit must be further examined. A deal of study has been great plank house, the Pueblo with its honeycomb of devoted to the cunning Tubal Cains, the surprising prochambers, the small groups of thatched houses in tropical ductions of whose handiwork have been recovered in the America, and the Patagonian toldos of skin are examples. art provinces of Mexico and the Cordilleras, especially in Chiriqui, between Costa Bica and Colombia. It must be The Indian habitation was made up of this composite admitted, however, that both the tools and the processes abode, with whatever out-structures and garden plots were escaped the archaeologist, as they did “the ablest needed. A group of abodes, however joined together, have goldsmiths in Spain, for they never could conceive how constituted the village or home of the tribe, and there was added to these a town hall or large assembly structure they had been made, there being no sign of a hammer or engraver or any other instrument used by them, the where men gathered and gossiped, and where all dramatic an Indians having none such ” (Herrera). and religious ceremonies were held. Powell contends that The potter’s wheel did not exist in the Western world, in a proper sense none of the Indian tribes were nomadic, but but it was almost invented. Time and muscle, knack and that governed by water-supply, bad seasons, and supeistiottery. tion (and discomfort from vermin must be added), even touch, a trained eye and brain, and an unlimited array of patterns hanging on fancy’s walls, aided the Pueblo tribes often tore down and rebuilt their domiby a box of dry sand, were competent to give the charming ciles. The fur trade, the horse, the gun, disturbed the I results. No more striking contrast can be found between sedentary habit of American tribes. Little attention was
